Embracing New Global Opportunities
Despite a challenging year, Toonz Media Group forges ahead with strong slate of creative-driven projects.
Despite a challenging year, Toonz Media Group forges ahead with strong slate of creative-driven projects.
Despite all its challenges, the year 2020 is shaping up to be quite an eventful one for Toonz Media Group, the Trivandrum, Indiabased animation powerhouse which produces numerous hours of 2D and CG animated projects through its studios in Turkey, New Zealand, Spain and Ireland. As studio CEO P. Jayakumar tells us in an exclusive interview, “This past year has been quite strange and challenging for everyone across the world,” he notes. “It’s been no different for Toonz Media Group, yet what we like to see as the highlight of the year is the amazing collaborations we were able to forge this year.”
Jayakumar points out, “Starting with our partnership with creators like Keith Chapman, Jean-Marie Olivier and Janet Hubert, with whom we are co-producing very interesting, value-oriented shows. We also entered into partnerships for new shows with some great studios and production houses such as Italy’s Rainbow S.p.A and London-based Nucleus Media Rights. We are coproducing highly anticipated animation features with leading production houses like Highland Films, Exodus Film Group and Cinema Management Group. All in all, Toonz has been able to strengthen its global clientele in 2020, garnering opportunities to produce specialized, high quality content.”
Continuing to Meet Deadlines
Of course, the COVID situation and the ensuing lockdown in India did have an impact on the studio, but Jayakumar says Toonz was able to tackle the situation to a large extent through meticulous planning and crisis management. “The lockdown meant that we could not commute to office, but there were production deadlines and other commitments to meet,” he notes. “So, we took up a massive asset transfer operation, to shift the machines of our artists from the studios to their homes. Around 500 machines were shifted as part of this, in a matter of two days. Most of these are workstations with high-end software for animation production. We are striving hard to ensure that none of our projects are affected by the situation. We have a well-formulated business continuity plan in place, so we are prepared to meet any further unforeseen disruption. So far, we haven’t had any major challenges with meeting deadlines.”
Toonz is currently preparing for MIP Junior and MIPCOM events in October. “We are putting together our top titles to be showcased at MIPCOM. Besides our distribution wing Imira’s extensive catalogue, we will be showcasing many new projects at various stages of development, financing and production,” says the CEO. “On the production front, Toonz has several exciting projects. I am proud to say that all of them have extremely diverse and relevant content. Like I said earlier, we are collaborating with many renowned creators, like Keith Chapman with whom we are doing a pre-school project titled Paddypaws & Pals. Another one is JG & the BC Kids, in partnership with veteran American actress Janet Hubert. The project, which inspires kids to embrace differences, is entirely driven by a multi-cultural team.”
The studio is also launching two major initiatives in the coming months. “The first one is likely to be a gamechanger and will essentially consolidate our position as a top kids’ content provider in the digital space,” maintains Jayakurar. “It is an exclusive kids’ OTT platform, showcasing the vast library of Toonz’s original productions, co-productions and licensed properties. The other initiative is on the animation education front. Toonz is already a pioneer in this field in India. We are now on the anvil of launching an online academy dedicated to not just animation but the whole gamut of creative arts. You will hear more about these initiatives in the coming days.”
Next Stop, Unreal Engine
According to the studio head, Toonz currently employs 1000 artists and staff working directly for the outfit and around 2000 indirectly through its associate partners. “In terms of animation pipeline, we have a traditional 2D animation pipeline based on Harmony and Flash,” he notes. “For 3D animation we mostly use Autodesk Maya, and VRay for textual rendering.
Toonz is also the only Indian company to achieve real time rendering of 3D projects using Adobe’s Unity platform. We are planning to use Unreal Engine for high-scale projects. Toonz also has stopmotion and live-action production streams, which is primarily based in our Ireland studio Telegael.
“Toonz has come a long way in the past 20 years, from its humble beginnings as a small startup in Technopark, Trivandrum, to a major studio spread across the world,” he adds. “When we started off, animation was not even a sector in India, so basically we built our business from scratch. Today we are a 360 degree studio, and we stand at the forefront of specialized content creation, production, distribution & rights exploitation, digital, gaming, AR/VR and other emerging technologies, as well as licensing & merchandising. Toonz Media Group has extended its global reach in various divisions over the years, adding Spanish production/distribution company Imira Entertainment under the group and then acquiring the Emmy Award-winning Irish production house Telegael. Toonz New Zealand and Toonz Turkey are the latest additions, allowing us to focus on production and distribution in the Australian and Middle Eastern markets.”
The CEO also points out that Toonz’s digital enterprises as also faring quite well with vieweres around the world. “Toonz’s YouTube channel bouquet saw 70% increase in subscription, 50% increase in views and 51% increase in watch time last year,” he notes. “We have more than 14 million subscribers on YouTube and a monthly viewership rate of 350 million. Gummy Bear & Friends, which is co-owned by Toonz, crossed 6 million subscribers on YouTube, while Season 1 of the show crossed 2 billion views.” Jayakumar also points out that high on the studio’s list of priorities is giving back to the creative community and nurturing new talent. “We have launched several initiatives for this, like the Toonz Academy, one of the top animation schools in India, and sponsoring events like the Cocoon Concept Lab and Animation Masters Summit.” ◆
For more info, visit toonz.co.